September 2013: Legitimacy problems in established democracies

Three themes will be discussed during the sessions: One, the democratic performance of parties in elections; two, how adequate parties operate as intermediaries between the electorate’s preferences (interests) and party government; and three, the institutional relationship between parties – government – electorate and its consequences for government efficacy regarding politically contested issues. This symposium is not intended to solve all theoretical or empirical problems, but to take stock of comparatively driven research of the multifarious manifestations and dimensions of legitimacy and to enhance future research on ‘Legitimacy’. Presentations by Rudy Andeweg, Klaus Armingeon, Ian Budge, Cees van der Eijk, Anton Hemerijck, Liesbet Hooghe, Hans Keman, Kees van Kersbergen, Hans-Peter Kriesi, Gary Marks, Michael McDonald, Paul Pennings, Manfred Schmidt, Jacques Thomassen.

Nieuwe publicaties van medewerkers POL

Henk Overbeek, Bastiaan van Apeldoorn and Naná de Graaff (eds) (2012) The Rebound of the Capitalist State: The Rearticulation of the State-Capital Nexus in the Global Crisis, Special Issue of: Globalizations, 9(4).

Bastiaan van Apeldoorn and Naná de Graaff (2012) ‘Corporate Elite Networks and US Post-Cold War Grand Strategy from Clinton to Obama’, European Journal of International Relations, Online first, June 22, 27 pp.

Bastiaan van Apeldoorn and Naná de Graaff (2012) ‘The Limits of the Open Door and the US State-Capital Nexus’, Globalizations, 9 (4): 539-608.

2012: Nieuw boek door André Krouwel

Political parties regularly change and adapt in response to ever-changing circumstances. Until now these changes have frequently prompted both scholars and the media to suggest a whole new type of political party, and over time the number of models and types has proliferated to the point of confusion, contradiction, and a loss of explanatory power. In this sophisticated yet accessible study, André Krouwel rejects this mélange of models as inadequate. He utilizes a wide range of data sources to analyze the ideological, organizational, and electoral change undergone by more than one hundred European parties in fifteen different countries, from Scandinavia to the Iberian Peninsula, between 1945 and 2010. The result is one of the most comprehensive empirically grounded studies of the genesis, development, and transformation of political parties in advanced democratic states written to date.

Een korte omschrijving van het project: Deepening and broadening her earlier work and taking up recent advances in behavioral economics, Barbara Vis’ Vidi program’s advances and tests a theory of political decision-making under risk that holds on the individual level, the meso level (parties), and the macro level (governments). She draws on and develops prospect theory, which predicts that people take risk-averse decisions when facing gains while they are risk-seeking or acceptant when confronting losses.

The program’s first objective is to experimentally test to what extent (groups of) politicians display the same attitude towards risk as “normal” individuals do, i.e., whether prospect theory’s predictions hold. The second objective is to establish empirically why some political parties risk turning their constituency away by changing their policy position on salient topics, but others do not. The third objective is to assess empirically why some governments take decisions involving substantial electoral risks while others do not. Together with a post-doc and two PhDs, Barbara Vis answers the research questions through a series of quantitative, qualitative and experimental techniques.

Een korte omschrijving van het onderzoeksproject: Scientists today see mounting evidence that the entire earth system now operates well outside safe boundaries. According to a recent scientific assessment of the international Earth System Governance Project, human societies must change course and steer away from critical tipping points that might lead to rapid and irreversible change, while ensuring sustainable livelihoods for all. This requires a fundamental transformation in current patterns of consumption and production. The key question from a social science perspective is how to organize the co-evolution of societies and their surrounding environment, in other words, how to develop effective and equitable governance solutions for today’s global problems. A major concern in this respect is the increasing fragmentation of global governance architectures across a number of policy domains. While global governance architectures can be highly integrated (as in the case of the free trade architecture governed by one overarching institution), the environmental domain is fragmented among competing sets of policies, actor constellations, fundamental norms and underlying discourses. The consequences of this development for effective, equitable and legitimate global governance are not well understood. This project will (1) take stock of the existing level of fragmentation across a number of issue-areas in global environmental politics (climate change; biodiversity; marine governance); (2) explain the causes of fragmentation of global governance architectures based on a carefully designed set of variables; (3) analyze the implications of fragmentation across different scales of governance (i.e. international, regional and domestic levels); and finally (4) suggest policy responses to increased fragmentation.

"In this thesis, I analyse the labour market policies of Denmark, the Netherlands and Sweden in two different years to trace the effects of the European Strategy for Growth and Jobs in different political environments. The study reveals that the governments of these countries do not give equal attention to all recommendations and guidelines but engage in cherry-picking. Governments address in particular those recommendations and guidelines that fit within the ideological preferences of the incumbent parties. However, given the fact that government coalitions alternate regularly and it is hard to reverse implemented policies, it is expected that in the long run the ESGJ affects the direction of domestic labour market policy."

Publicaties medewerkers Politicologie

Crum, B. (2012). The European Parliament as a driving force in informal institution-building: The hard case of the EP’s relation with the High Representative for the CFSP. In Th. Christiansen and C. Neuhold (eds). International handbook on informal governance. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 354-73.

Publicaties van medewerkers POL

Vis, Barbara (2011 forthcoming), Under which conditions does spending on active labor market policies increase? An fsQCA analysis of 53 governments between 1985 and 2003, European Political Science Review.

Augustus 2011: Professor Peter Mair (1951-2011)

Last monday 15 August, Dr. Peter Mair, Professor of Comparative Politcs and Government at the EUI (Florence) has suddenly and unexpectedly passed away at the age of 60. He leaves behind his wife and 3 children. The political science community in Europe and beyond grieves this loss of an outstanding academic, journal editor and teacher.

Peter Mair was a native of Sligo (Ireland) and a graduate of University College Dublin and enjoyed a distinguished academic career and was the author of a large number of books, chapters and articles on comparative and European politics. It is a sad loss to European political science.

He graduated in 1974 and began his career as an assistant professor at the University of Limerick. He subsequently lectured at the universities of Strathclyde and Manchester before moving to the European University Institute of Florence in 1979. He moved to the University of Leiden in the Netherlands in 1987 and was appointed professor of comparative politics in 1994. In 2005 he returned to Florence and was appointed head of the department of political and social sciences in 2007.

Prof Mair specialised in the study of party and party systems and has written a number of books on the subject. He was co-author of Representative Government in Modern Europe , the fifth edition of which was published this year. He was also co-author of Identity, Competition and Electoral Availability , which was awarded the prestigious Stein Rokkan prize. Peter Mair served the comparative political science community by editorships of the internationally reputed European Journal of Political Science and of West European Politics.

Peter was a person of great charm, a congenial colleague and always encouraging students.We grieve over his loss and sympathize with his family he left behind too early and too soon.

On behalf of the department of Political Science
Prof. Hans Keman (VU University)
Chair in Comparative Political Science

September 2010: New PhD students and guest in the department

As of 1 September, the department of political science has four new PhD students, Jeanine Bezuijen, Benjamin Neudorfer, Michal Onderco and Jerome Schaefer. Moreover, in the first semester 2010/2011, Natascha Neudorfer is an official guest in the department as well as a fellow in the ERC Advanced Grant project 'Causes and Consequences of Multilevel Governance' of Liesbet Hooghe and Gary Marks.

Kees van Kersbergen, Henk Overbeek and Matthias Stepan have been invited to a workshop in Chengdou, 'The European Union after the Lisbon: Opportunities and Challenges', 7-9 May 2010.

The workshop has brought together the leading scholars in European Studies in China and a number of distinguished European scholars in the field.

Kees van Kersbergen discussed European Social Governance, Henk Overbeek the Political and Economic Diplomacy of the EU, and Matthias Stepan presented research on the Open Method of Coordination.

The week following the workshop, they gave lectures on European Integration and visited the Graduate Forum providing comments and suggestions to the PhD candidates in European Studies of Sichuan University who presented their research.

PhD students are invited to submit paper proposals (DL is 31 March). Papers should be related to our topic Democracy in Transformation. Broadly, we invite papers about the representative side of politics, namely elections, electoral systems and party behavior and parties and papers about the governance side of politics, namely public policy outputs. Specifically, some of the papers of PhDs who have signed up already are about populism, media effects, campaign strategies, the new politics of the welfare state and democratic legitimacy.

Clifton van der Linden guest doctoral researcher in the department

The department welcomes Clifton van der Linden as guest doctoral researcher for the next eight months.

Cliff is a PhD candidate in International Relations in the Department of Political Science at the University of Toronto. He is the past-chair of the G8 Research Group at the Munk Centre for International Studies and outgoing editor-in-chief of the Journal of International Law and International Relations at the University of Toronto Faculty of Law. Cliff is examining how European integration has contributed to the manifestation of a new brand of nationalism in Western Europe over the past two decades. He is particularly interested in how and why certain practices in Western Europe have become securitized under the auspices of a liberal nationalist sentiment. His research is funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Council of Canada.

Admissions open for MSc Specialisation Global Environmental Governance after successful start of new programme

Our new master specialisation Global Environmental Governance has seen a successful start this academic year 2009/10. This new programme is a unique combination of broad training in political science with intense specialised lectures and seminars on global environmental governance.

The admission procedure for new students is now open. For more information, download here the flyer and the programme for the specialisation in our MSc in Political Science, and have a look at the admissions website for the master programme.

2009: Laura Horn wins FSW Dissertation Prize 2009

Laura Horn has won the annual faculty dissertation prize with her PhD dissertation 'The Transformation of Corporate Governance Regulation in the European Union - Towards a Marketisation of Corporate Control'. The jury recommended her dissertation for the clear theoretical framework, clear and elegant argumentation and wide range of sources. Horn's dissertation will be published in 2010 by Palgrave. For more information, see the faculty website (in Dutch).

Elsevier Ranking 2009 - Political science again voted best POL programme in the Netherlands

According to the Elsevier university ranking 2009, the BA Political Sience at the VU has been voted the best political science programme by Political Science Professors in the Netherlands for the second time in a row.

2009: EU Profiler wins e-Democracy Award

For the past five years, the World e-Democracy Forum has rewarded those who have made a commitment to carry out meaningful political change through use of the Internet and new technologies. Together with the other 9 finalists, EU Profiler, developed by the European University Institute, will receive its trophy at the ceremony to be held during the French National Assembly on Thursday, October 22nd, in partnership with the American web portal PoliticsOnline, the Politech Institute of Europe and Blog Territorial.

At the international level, this is the most renowned award in the field of e-democracy.

The European University Institute (Florence, Italy) and its technical partners (the Swiss NCCR Democracy and the Dutch Kieskompas) developed EU Profiler at the beginning of this year. Its objective was to help EU citizens make their choice for whom to vote at this year’s European Parliament elections, as well as to analyse the political preferences and voting behaviour of the European electorate. In replying to thirty simple questions pertinent to the main issues of this electoral campaign, EU citizens could, for the first time ever, express their opinion on the most important topics relevant to the future of Europe – immigration, energy, social policies, global warming, security, unemployment and European integration. By doing so, they were able to easily identify the party that best corresponded to their expectations and ideas on the future of the European Union.

Annemarie van Elfrinkhof has been invited by Prof. dr. Hooghe to spend a semester at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill as a visiting scholar, starting August 25, 2009. UNC is an excellent venue for advanced training in political methodology and comparative and European Politics. It is the home of an important method for party positioning, the Chapel Hill expert survey, and is known for cross validating methods for party positioning. Annemarie is part of the CAMeRa project Text to Political Positions and her training at UNC will benefit the method that she is developing together with Isa Maks and Bertie Kaal (Faculty of Arts) to extract the positions of political parties from texts.

Transatlantic Master in European Politics

On May 12th, 2009, a meeting took place at the Department at which the cooperation between our Department and the Center for European Studies of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (the ‘other’ home of our colleagues Liesbet Hooghe and Gary Marks) was sealed with the signing of the official document by John Stephens, Director of the Center for European Studies, and Kees van Kersbergen, Head of Department of the VU Political Science Department. Under the terms of the agreement, up to 10 graduate students from the UNC Transatlantic Master in European Politics program will spend a full academic year at our Department taking part in the MSc Political Science program. In September 2009, the first group of five UNC students will arrive in Amsterdam to enrich our Master programme.

June 2009: Model United Nations workshop

Will you solve the conflict in Congo?

The department of Political Science, in cooperation with SAMUN and EOS, is organising a Model United Nations (MUN) workshop for all Political Science students on 4 and 5 June 2009. Led by experts from SAMUN, the UN simulation is free and open to ALL students (BA, PMC, MA, PhD, alumni).

This workshop is your chance to get first hand experience of how the UN system works, how countries can cooperate (or not) and why, despite all our theories and concepts, the bodies are still piling up. Each student will represent ONE country. The case we’ll be discussing and negotiating is the conflict in Congo, and how to react to it. All study materials and the rules of procedure will be provided.

If you want to register for the MUN, or would like more information, please send an email with your name, student number (if applicable) and a very short motivation on why you want to participate and which country you would want to represent to Naná de Graaff:na.de.graaff@fsw.vu.nl. The deadline for registration is 11 May 2009!

April 2009: Dr. Ian Budge (Essex) International Research Fellow in our department

As of 1 April Dr. Ian Budge will be International Research Fellow in our department. Ian Budge is Honorary Research Professor at the University of Essex. His research focus is, broadly, on democratic theory from a comparative perspective.

He is the author or co-author of some twenty volumes and sixty monographs on democratic theory and practice, most recently Elections, Parties and Democracy (2006). He is the founder of the international Comparative Manifesto Research Project, to which Hans Keman and Paul Pennings have also contributed. Together with Hans Keman and Jaap Woldendorp he is managing the Party Government Data Set.

May 2009: Workshop 'With or without Lisbon: continuous institutional change in the EU'

After the demise of the Treaty establishing a Constitution for Europe and the rejection of the Lisbon Reform Treaty in the referendum in Ireland, the prospects for formal EU reform by Treaty revision look rather gloomy. Even if the Lisbon Treaty will eventually be passed, new Treaty negotiations are unlikely to be anticipated for the first time in 25 years.

Still, it would be too quick to conclude that the EU’s institutional evolution has come to a standstill. Scholarly analysis has pointed out how also in the absence of formal Treaty change, EU institutions and the norms governing them have been subject to ‘informal change’. A classical case in point is the jurisprudence of the ECJ that on some rather momentous occasions rather sought to elaborate the spirit of the Treaties than to follow them by the letter. In more recent years, in particular the European Parliament but also some elements in the Council of Ministers have separately and in collaboration been remarkably active in developing new modes of operation where the Treaties remain silent.

This workshop is to reflect upon the potential of institutional change that has emerged in the shadow of the attempts to move to a new Treaty. It does so by focussing on three sets of institutions: the European Parliament, the role of national parliaments in the EU architecture, and the European and national courts. The focus on these three institutions is motivated by a particular interest in the role that normative ideas may play in driving and justifying informal institutional change. Here we think in the first place of normative ideas like the idea of ‘popular sovereignty’ in the case of parliaments and the idea of ‘basic rights’ in the case of courts, but one might also think of the idea of ‘national sovereignty’.

Among the questions to be pursued are thus:

What institutional changes have taken place since the beginning of the Laeken process?And what potential for future changes has been opened up?

How do these changes relate to the proposals that have been part of the formal Treaty re-
negotiations? Do they, for instance, anticipate them or rather respond to them?

What causes the opportunities for institutional change to arise and to be successfully carried through? And to what extent are normative ideas essential in providing them with a normative and practical justification?

What do these findings bode for the prospects of future Treaty change or even a renewed attempt to constitutionalise the Union on the basis of popular engagement and consent?

MSc Political Science - Global Environmental Governance track

From the academic year 2009/10 onwards there will be a third specialisation in our MSc programme. Whereas students until now had the choice between a specialisation in International Relations & Transnational Governance or Comparative & European Politics, students can now also choose to take modules in the Global Environmental Governance track. This consists of a course on Selected Issues in Global Environmental Governance and a Workshop in Governance for Sustainable Development. The new specialisation has been set up in cooperation with the Institute for Environmental Studies (IVM), in particular Prof. Frank Biermann and Dr. Philipp Pattberg.

This new programme is a unique combination of broad training in political science with intense specialised lectures and seminars on global environmental governance. In the first part of the programme, students will get a solid foundation in political theory, methods of political science, and international relations. In the second part, they will specialise in global environmental governance, with emphasis on the new actors, mechanisms and interlinkages in this important field of international relations. Students will finalise their studies with an MSc thesis, which may be written in conjunction with the many large-scale international research projects already underway at the Institute for Environmental Studies of the VU University Amsterdam. The Institute's department on Environmental Policy Analysis was evaluated in 2007 as the top research department in the Netherlands in its field; students in this new MSc programme can also rely on the department's extensive international networks, such as the Europe-wide Global Governance Project (www.glogov.org) and the worldwide Earth System Governance Project (www.earthsystemgovernance.org).

The new MSc programme is demanding in its combination of a disciplinary focus on political science within a multidisciplinary field of study. It unites challenging academic work with the search for practical solutions and policy reform. It is targeted at students with both academic and practical career objectives, and it is decidedly international in approach. Moreover, as a one-year programme it can be particularly appealing to those who may prefer a shorter timeframe for their academic pursuits. Finally, it is located in one of the most fascinating cities in Europe, known not only for its vibrant cultural life and architectural beauty, but also for its strong environmental policies, with more bicycles per inhabitant than cars.

See this flyer (pdf) for more information on the MA specialisation. More information will be available on this website soon. Please contact us at info.fsw@vu.nl if you have any questions!

2008: Kees van Kersbergen back in the department after research stay in Konstanz

Kees van Kersbergen, head of the department of Political Science, has returned from a research stay at the University of Konstanz. From January - October 2008, Kees has been working in the context of the 'Kulturwissenschaftliche Kolleg Konstanz'.

His work has mainly focused on finalizing the theoretical introduction to an edited volume titled “Religion, Class Coalitions, and Welfare State Regimes” and completing the manuscript of this edited volume and preparing it for publication. The aim of the book (edited with Philip Manow from the University of Konstanz) is to re-asses the role of religion in modern welfare state development. This is essential for understanding the historical causes of the marked institutional differences between Europe’s welfare regimes and for better understanding the present functioning logic of Europe’s different political economies. The work radically reviews established knowledge in comparative historical welfare state studies and introduces a new perspective on why and how religion shaped modern social protection systems.

In November, January and March Stuart Shields will visit our department for a series of short research stays.

Stuart is Lecturer in International Political Economy at the University of Manchester. Stuart completed his PhD on the transnational dimension of regime transformation in Eastern Central Europe at Aberystwyth's Department of International Politics, in 2002, and joined Manchester in 2003. Stuart's research interests are in International Political Economy, Eastern Europe and post-communist transition, EU enlargement, neoliberalism, and globalisation. He has been secretary of the Critical Political Economy Research Network of the European Sociological Association, and is the current convenor of the British International Studies Association International Political Economy working group.

While visiting the Vrije Universiteit Stuart will be working on the following project connected to a new collaboration with members of the department on the Limits to Neoliberal Reform and the Reemergence of State Capitalism.

The limits to neoliberalism - Populism and the 'new' Europe This project engages in a theoretical critique of the postcommunist state's role in the contestation of neoliberalism in the `new' Europe. It asks why opposition to neo-liberalism so frequently takes the form of populist and regressive nationalist appeals to workers, as right-wing movements make greater headway than the traditional left.
The paper focuses on Poland and Hungary, contemporary examples of post-communist states in the global political economy that have pursued fundamental changes within national economic, political, and social spheres of life. Recent events in these countries have challenged the established neoliberal rolled back state. In 2006 the celebrations of the 1956 revolution provoked neo-Nazi demonstrations that were brutally put down by the Hungarian police. From 2005 to 2007, Poland's right wing populist government was actively involved in high-profile attacks on gay rights, favoured the reintroduction of the death penalty, and demanded a complete ban on abortion. The project seeks to explain the character of the rejection of neoliberalism in these cases, and the absence of a left alternative. By interrogating what has happened to labour in the new Europe since 2004 the project explores how and why the `genuine' anti-capitalist alternative has come from the right wing with the pro-welfare position now dominated by politically regressive nationalist forces.

Stuart's visit is funded under the British Council NWO UK-Netherlands Partnership Programme in Science jointly run and financed by the British Council and Platform Bèta Techniek.

November 2009: International Research Seminar - Dr. Ian Bruff, Edge Hill University (UK)

International Research Seminar (IRS), Friday 28 November,

15.00 – 17.00 (Z009, Metropolitan Building).

'A Critical Analysis of the Dutch and German Varieties of Capitalism: Wassenaar, the Alliance for Jobs and post-2001 Developments'

A sample chapter of the book is available at the publisher's website. The paper on which the presentation is based will be distributed in time.

We welcome you to join us for the discussion and drinks afterwards.

Political Science at VU University voted best POL programme in the Netherlands

In a recent poll amongst Political Science professors, senior lecturers and students in the Netherlands, the political science programme at the VU University Amsterdam has been voted the best POL study programme in the country.

In the Elsevier Faculty Rating, the quality of the members of staff and their academic work, as well as the BA and MA programmes have been assessed.

The department is delighted by this recognition of its efforts to continually improve its study programme, and will of course remain committed to its high standards.

Guest researcher in the Department

In cooperation between the KNAW and the Chinese Academy for Social Sciences (CASS), Dr. MO Wei of the Institute of European Studies, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing has joined our department for one month.

She is Associate Professor of the Institute of European Studies at CASS, the Editor of the Chinese Journal of European Studies and a part-time lawyer of the Bagui Law Firm. Her research, in the field of International Economic Law, focuses on the legal aspects of the EU trade system. Her current research project is concerned with the politics and legal frictions between the EU and China over anti-dumping policies.

2009: Recent and forthcoming publications by members of the department

Dr. Barbara Vis (2009) 'Governments and unpopular social policy reform: Biting the bullet or steering clear?' forthcoming 2009 in European Journal of Political Research

Abstract

Under which conditions and to what extent do governments pursue unpopular social policy reforms for which they might be punished in the next election? This article shows that there exists substantial cross-cabinet variation in the degree to which governments take unpopular measures and argues that current studies cannot adequately explain this variation. Using insights from prospect theory, a psychological theory of choice under risk, this study hypothesises that governments only engage in unpopular reform if they face a deteriorating socio-economic situation, a falling political position, or both. If not, they shy away from the risk of reform. A fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fs/QCA) of the social policy reform activities pursued by German, Dutch, Danish and British cabinets between 1979 and 2005 identifies a deteriorating socio-economic situation as necessary for unpopular reform. It is only sufficient for triggering reform, however, if the political position is also deteriorating and/or the cabinet is of rightist composition. This study's findings further the scholarly debate on the politics of welfare state reform by offering a micro-foundation that helps one to understand what induces political actors aspiring to be re-elected to engage in electorally risky unpopular reform.

This article investigates how ambiguous constitutional design affected president-cabinet relations, and constitutional change in post-communist Poland and Hungary. Constitutional provisions related to the prerogatives of presidents and governments were frequently subject to political conflict during the 1990s. The power struggle in the two cases developed and consolidated along two distinct patterns. In Poland, failed attempts to modify the constitution initially stirred up and extended intra-executive conflicts. With the adoption of a new constitution in 1997 the struggle over power between president and council of ministers was finally settled. In Hungary constitutional court rulings were instrumental in the settlement of president-cabinet conflicts.

Research Output 2007

For an overview of the department's research output in 2007, please see the document below.

2007: Annual Report

2008: Bibliography Dutch Politics (1998-2008)

A bibliography of Dutch politics compiled by Dr. Jaap Woldendorp is now published on our website.

June 2008: Workshop on the Politics of Change

The Department of Political Science at the VU Amsterdam and the Center for European Studies at UNC-Chapel Hill are hosting a two-day workshop on party politics, elections, and public opinion entitled "The Politics of Change." The event will take place on June 13-14 at the Felix Meritis in Amsterdam and is open to all NIG members. Further information about the workshop, including a detailed program, can be found by clicking on the link below. If you would like to attend, please feel free to contact the workshop organizers.

On May 16 (Friday) the University of Antwerp and Electoral Compass will organise a conference under the title Voting Advice Applications (VAAs): between charlatanism and political science. For more information or to register for this conference, please do not hesitate to contact the organizers.

March 2008: "The roots of China's Foreign Policy: Lessons for the future"

A group of students from the LLM “Law and Politics of International Security”, together with Kenneth Manusama from the Law faculty organise a conference on Chinese foreign policy which you are invited to attend. The conference takes place on 6 March 2008 15.00-18.30.

Succesful VU Dissertations

On September 27, Catherine de Vries-Netjes defended her dissertation ‘European Integration and National Elections’ very successfully. She received her title with distinction (cum laude). Catherine is currently working at Leiden University.

Tanja Aalberts, who defended her dissertation ‘The Politics of Sovereignty’ at the VU university in 2006, received the John Blondel PhD Prize at the ECPR General Conference in Pisa. She already received the PhD prize of the Dutch political science association in May 2007. Tanja is also currently working at Leiden University.

2006: Summer School Report

The 2006 parties summer school 'Democracy in Europe: European Politics and Multi-level Governance' was organised by our department. All papers and a report by the local organisers are now available on the summer school website. The 2007 summer school will take place in Florence.